The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not.
I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
The worst variation I’ve ever seen, courtesy of r/CrappyDesign: My oven uses a touchscreen, so whenever I open it, steam gets on the touchscreen and messes with the settings.
Same experience with an induction cooktop with touch controls. At least once a week this is what that looks like:
1. Place pot of water on element to boil
2. Enable boost mode
3. Water reaches boil as I'm distracted with other prep / child / HN post, and overflows
4. All controls (including ability to disable boost, reduce heat, or turn off element) rendered completely inoperable due to liquid on glass surface impacting pcap sensing
To my enormous relief, the Samsung stove that came with our house gets this right - even covered in water the controls still work. I was previously dead-against induction just because I couldn't find a good quality stove-top with physical buttons, to the point where I'd already budgeted replacing it with gas when we bought the house. I don't know how they've done it, but it's the only one I've ever used that manages. (For comparison, the high-end Miele and cheap-and-cheerful non-branded ones I've used in various rental houses over the last 20 years have all had exactly the problem you describe above).
A few of the new home models (in Europe at least) come with physical knobs.
My two gripes about induction are the touch controls they typically ship with and the inability to roast peppers over an open flame. But the incredible temperature response makes up for both IMO.
I moved into a new apartment with an induction cooktop and radiators with the same type of "buttonless button" controls and those continually give me problems. You can't just touch them, but you have to slide your finger over the controls in just the right way, and hope that (for the radiator) you've hit the 1 in 3 chance of it actually working.
My next cooktop will probably still be induction, but it will definitely have knobs.
My Whirlpool stove does the opposite thing: after I've finished cooking and it's cooling down, it will activate the Warm oven setting on its own. I find that the Warm touch button is especially sensitive on its own, so there must be some small flexing happening somewhere and activating it.
Solution: Immediately after cooking I walk over to the junction box and turn off the breaker to the stovetop.
Our new house came with a new Samsung dishwasher that had touch controls along the top lip of the door, and the door popped open at the end of every wash to let steam out. Imagine heated clouds of water passing over the panel every time. The panel started acting strangely/inconsistently within 3 years, and then by year 4 it was dead.
Probably not many explicitly, but I bet it contributes to a lot of shoppers thinking the appliance is "sleek" or "modern". Touch screens have been a big design fad in recent years and design fads sell products.
I'm hopeful that the tide is turning on these designs as more people have to use them day to day and realize that touchscreens are categorically worse than tactile controls in a number of scenarios.
Reminds me of some rental cars I had over the years (Buck being my favorite). I couldn't imagine anybody actually trying to drive the car before releasing. They were so bad.
Buttons stopped working after warranty expired so had to pay for a service call to have it fixed. Luckily no parts were needed. I don't recall the reason right now.
It has a spinny disc, so like a potentiometer but not. It is a flat removable ring and behind it it uses a touch button of sorts
You have to pull it off amd clean it before every use for it to work and when it does work it is very fiddly to use.
And ridiculously expensive to replace for what is a glorified magnet if you happen to accidentally burn the plastic a little bit which is enough for it to becoe unusable.
We have a Smeg oven, not with touchscreen controls, but with two pushable knobs that are easily pressed (thus starting the oven) by brushing past them. This oven has the worst user experience of anything, hardware or software, I've even used.
My oven doesn't have a touchscreen but it does have touch controls and it works perfectly, it's never disturbed by the steam from the oven even when it quite visibly condenses on the surface.
My point is that it isn't always a design failure to use touch controls, sometimes it is an implementation failure that makes them unusable.
What makes it a design failure? It seems good to me. The surface is completely flat glass and easily cleaned, there is no possibility for dirt to get into the switches or accumulate in crevices.
Usually what happens is that it's tested under ideal "lab conditions", so this never happens. In real life ovens get a bit grimy and produce more smoke. Stuff like that. Still shoddy engineering of course.
It's the same with designers doing their light-grey text on a white background with their 8K colour-perfect screen in optimal lighting conditions, and then when you point out this is difficult to read they go "I don't see the problem!"
They also love to disable the mouse scroll and the scrollbars, so the page has 300 more settings but you have no way of knowing that (this also happened to me on windows 11 btw).
It reached the point where I implemented my own script to bypass the GUI at work.
- Argo Workflows UI (no link, as you need to login).
- CV from "senior UX engineer" I received yesterday in response to a job ad I posted.
- Just now I found https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ when searching for something else – the quote at the top is nigh-unreadable due to the "font-weight: 250" which has the same kind of effect as low-contrast grey text.
- I've also had some discussions with designers over the years. Some view their work as "art" and get incredibly defensive about even minor changes done for real pragmatic reasons. Of course, there are also plenty other more pragmatic and competent designers out there.
- HN does it for downvoted/dead comments and "text posts" such as ask/show HN. Dang said it's a feature. Many disagree.
It's not as prevalent as it once was – it was even worse 10 years ago – but it's still encountered fairly regularly.
Semantics, but the #5e636a (39% lightness) text of Neo4j and #1c1e21 (12% lightness) of RabbitMQ aren't what I would consider _light_ grey. That would be up in the #bbb-eee range, or 75%+ lightness (black 0%, dark grey 25%, grey 50%, light grey 75%, white 100%). And I would be surprised if designers were involved in those 2 documentation sites.
Font weight is a crucial factor of readability, and it depends on screen specifics. On my 2020 M1 mbp at ~40% screen brightness, the NNGroup link quote is quite readable. As it is on my phone.
I don't rate any designer or developer very highly if they're too precious about their "art".
The HN dead/downvoted comments is contentious for sure. I don't agree with the choice fwiw.
Nope. And not sure how you made the leap there from me giving context into my environment and equipment and how I was perceiving some text on the screen.
It's all "readable" in the sense of "I can read it", but not in the sense of "I can read it effortlessly". I have a bit of CSS in Stylus to fix it, and it takes noticeably less effort to read it with a "normal" font. The RabbitMQ menu is just so much easier to scan as well with a more normal colour.
Good distinction between light grey setting and perception (I was speaking to the former). Maybe on your screen/OS/browser for a given font, a setting of #000 would start at (perceived) “grey”.
And agreed that readability is a scale and it’s best to be on the “easy” end of that scale.
I dont mind the fact that they havent tested it with food, but I cant understand how they never recalled every single unit after noticing it for the first time.
Its like they see it, and be like "Ah, everyone who bought it got screwed over, and it will hurt our brand, but its still cheaper to quietly ignore it". Despisable
Don't forget to pair the Touch Button with a Minimalist design that gives no indication if a button has been pressed!
Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.
Don’t forget the Uber-minimalist aesthetic, where there are no markings or textures to designate the touch regions, but instead you just touch or swipe different parts of the object for different functionality. That’s my favourite, especially after you haven’t used something for a few months.
Bonus points if a firmware update changes the invisible control layout.
Samsung used to do this for some of their cheaper monitors. I remember I bought a couple of them for one of my early dual-screen setups (15+ years ago) and every day I would slowly and gently run my finger along the entire length of the monitor until it would power on. It had to be slow otherwise there was a chance I would power it off again going back the other direction. Even more fun because after turning it on, I would slide past some other button, unintentionally opening some menu and changing some random settings (most commonly changing the input from DVI to something else). If I was lucky, I would power it off after changing something and wonder why it wasn't powering on again (note: it was powered on, but set to the wrong input). How that monitor got past Q&A I will never understand. IIRC the buttons had tiny, nearly invisible (light grey on black) icon labels... I used to keep a flashlight on my table so I could figure out which invisible button to press to get things working again.
Taking them off pauses your stuff. Sometimes that's useful, but on a desktop that's most often just annoying, particularly if you're just itching or adjusting them.
More mysterious is that tapping them also pauses, but not always, and not reliably enough to actually use to pause and unpause.
Even more mysterious though is the "two finger" tap which changes your headphones mode entirely, so that any background noise stops the noise cancellation. (It calls this "Conversation mode" or something).
But any background noise seems to cancel the noise cancellation, so it's less useful than just turning that off.
But this feature is easy to accidentally turn on, and it took a lot of googling in frustration to work out how to get it back to the normal operation.
God knows what other hidden features these things have, because who bothers to read the manual for a pair of headphones?
I had to install Sony's app for my headphones to disable automatically turning off noise canceling whenever it detected speech.
I'd be playing a game and say "Dammit" in response to something and my headphones would be like "OH! You're trying to have a conversation! Let me help you with that!"
Or I'd be on an airplane watching something funny, I'd laugh, and it'd disable the noise canceling.
This kind of automation is a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.
Thank you! I have a pair of these and they recently started beeping occasionally and switching noise canceling mode on their own. I was not looking forward to digging through search results on this.
Probably shares same design as "integrated" that is door covered version. Which certainly does look cleaner interior design, but trade offs any reasonable visibility of progress. Style over substance. I would also love to see time counter on front, instead not seeing dishwasher...
We are semi-unhappy with ours. Our kids will open it to quickly grab a cup or bowl if nothing else is available, and forget to press the "Start" button to restart it. Our old washer would auto-restart after being opened. Oh, and the Start button needs to be pressed for more than a second, and there isn't really a tactile click when it succeeds. Which it doesn't always do. And if you press it twice it can reset and have to re-run the entire cycle.
Hell yeah! Let's change the active region to the upper left corner of the hamburger symbol and make sure that the hieroglyph itself doesn't reflect this in any way.
Dear Satan, I believe now would be a good time to discuss the subject of a raise!
I spent (5y ago) so much time searching for induction stove with physical knobs. The touch interface at my previous place was driving me crazy, a slight misalidgment and the stove would beep like it’s end of the world. Luckily Miele produces some at the premium price (or was at the time) but I considered it an investment in my mental health.
A touch interface on the stove seems like the canonical example of a straightforwardly bad idea. Sure, let's use a capacitive touch interface to control the most dangerous appliance in the kitchen, one which also happens to frequently be the most humid spot and also the most likely to feature splashed oil! What could possibly go wrong?
My favorite design issue with those: capacitive burner controls on the cooking surface mean you can spill something on them and be unable to turn the heat off to clean the thing keeping you from turning the heat off.
Have you encountered any that work like this? In my small sample (n~5, Europe), all capacitive cooktops turn off whenever you spill something on the controls.
Which, while better than buning your house down, is still needlessly annoying.
What I really want is for the controls to not be on the cooking surface at all but that only seems to be available for stovetop + oven combinations which have their own annoying limitations.
> I actually love that I can easily wipe everything when it's dirty. I'd hate cleaning knobs and most of the tactile buttons.
the knobs on my manually operated range pull right off their posts and go soak in the sink with some soap and hot water once a week while i spray the range's control surface with whatever spray cleaner and wipe it off with every other flat surface in my kitchen.
after ten or fifteen minutes of soaking, anything left on the knobs fall off with a dry rag that goes in the cloth washer afterwards.
I’m in full agreement with everyone here who hates touch screens, and I also spent a long time looking for induction ranges with physical knobs (IIRC there was only one model in the universe with them), and was so mad that I had to get one with touch buttons…
But I gotta say, the ability to just simply wipe the whole stove surface with a towel and be done has more than made up for the touch buttons sucking.
With physical knobs: Take knobs off and soak them, use a towel and wipe a circle around the nub that’s left, try not to leave a circular streak pattern, put knobs back. Or just wipe the knobs with the towel and get close enough on the surface.
Touch buttons: wipe the whole thing in big strokes, you’re done.
I clean the whole surface after every use now, because it’s just so damned easy.
I think that was the one model in the universe I was referring to. I don’t have the layout in my kitchen to put knobs in the front, my stovetop has to fit in a pretty well-defined area. Knobs in the front would have been totally ideal.
Yep, every knob I've ever had on a stove works this way and makes them trivial to clean. In the meantime, during regular use they're guaranteed to never stop functioning because they got wet or oily.
Oh, and on exactly over what surface we usually lift or holds lids that most certainly have at least some condensation... You know when taking a peek or stirring it for a few seconds...
Totally agree. The controllability of my Nef induction hobs was excellent, but the controls were horrendous. E.g. going from a level 9 rapid heat-up to a level 2 simmer is seven distinct touches. Each with an annoying beep. Related to this is the lack of a single-tap hob-off for an individual hob.
For medical reasons [1] I had to transition from the induction hob to a ceramic hob, and had to choose the Nef equivalent because it had the same physical footprint. So now I have the same crap controls with much worse response time to the control inputs themselves. The ceramic hob also can't detect when a pan has been removed so will leave a hob dangerously hot but not glowing. I've got used to it now but it is very frustrating and still catches me out sometimes.
[1] I have an implanted defibrillator whose sensor is nulled out by an inductions hob's magnetic fields.
A lot of people don't realise that you can push both the up and down button at the same time to set a hob ring to zero intensity. So level 9 to level 2 is actually just three presses.
Love it. Removable magnetic buttons with flat flush surface underneath that’s just as easy to clean as a touch surface. The only downside is the possibility of losing the knobs.
Fortunately by last year the this Café (GE) double oven induction range was available here in the US: https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... I have a few quibbles (mainly, that only one of the burners is properly sized for a 12" skillet) but overall I like it.
I don't mind the touch buttons for operating the oven and timers--in fact, they're nice and easy to clean (with a handy "lock screen" feature so you can spray and wipe down the front panel without everything going nuts) but I'm pretty sure trying to fine tune the burner settings using a touch slider while keeping an eye on multiple pans would have driven me nuts. I also have haven't had problems with the knobs getting dirty or being hard to wipe down if they do, to address a point raised in another reply.
Price splits the difference between the entry level ranges and the snobby brands (Miele, Thermador, etc).
I'm currently using Miele with touch controls but it's really good at filtering out false inputs. I have no problem whatsoever even with my messy cooking.
Too bad you have no way of telling how good controls are in a product before you start using them.
I spent like $5k on a Wolf gas range because it was the cheapest one on the market that simply had five knobs for the controls and absolutely nothing else. No computer, no screen, no shitty fake buttons, not even a clock. Worth it.
I think you'd have to get a plug-in one, which depending on your local voltage might not be ideal. The commercial ones made by Buffalo have one big knob but are pricey. Tefal make a £100 domestic one with actual buttons.
Of all things, it's a novel kind of stove with the distinctive feature that you can place a piece of plastic just next to the food and it will work fine... Why no designer wants to exploit that feature?
Yeah, that's also how my long journey with induction cooktops started.
My main grief with the induction cooktops was the ergonomics: Most touch surfaces on those cooktops require at least 2 touches: select the flame, then adjust the power. I don't know, that completely breaks the interaction for me. I want something to directly adjust the heat on every single one of the flames, especially when something starts to boil over or fries too fast. In addition, touch often wouldn't register on those, so I have to press longer or harder, both of which is even more inconvenient. No, even more: it outright sucks.
Well, and after years of searching, friends recommended me the AEG models, like IKE64450XB (here in Europe). And honestly, I was happy with the touch surface ever after: It reacts quickly enough and I can modify every flame at an instant.
I don't even get a penny for this, I'm just satisfied. So, yeah, touch can be good, like on a smartphone, even on household devices.
On the other side, it's really hit or miss with these touch UIs: I also have an combined washing machine + dryer from the same brand and there I need to press each touch surface for at least half a second, and not touch the metal case of the machine, otherwise the touch wouldn't register. Then, the UI would sometimes hang, but still register touches, playing them back once it has caught up.
A tiny amount of water getting on these buttons can make them go nuts too… I absolutely hate the electric stove ranges with surface touch buttons… as if those never get water on them…
Not as dangerous as a stove, but the Xbox One had a capacitive on-off button. Turns out the dog could turn it off just by his fur touching it when walking by it.
The security keypads at work use this terrible design: it's just a flat plastic panel with no moving parts. You have to push the numbers to enter your PIN, but with no buttons, and no mechanical feedback, you can't just type the number in: you have to PRESS... EACH... SPOT... AND... HOLD... while the laggy touch system takes its time registering your input. A daily irritation!
My clothes dryrer has buttons like that. And of course it will ignore button presses if it's not in the correct iternal state yet after you start it up or change modes (which at least is done via a real rotary knob). And you can't just tap the buttons (would be unsafe) but have to hold for 1/2 second. The clothes washer is thankfully still and older model with real buttons.
VW ID. cars have the worst fake buttons on the steering wheel. Multiple buttons were merged into a single mushy creaky touch-sensitive plastic face that is inconvenient and unreliable when you press intentionally, but easy to accidentally activate by brushing your hand over it.
They put the exact same faux buttons in their ICE cars.
This is not an EV thing. It's a contemporary trend, and it just happens that most newly designed cars are EVs now.
The rise of touchscreen technology was just coincidental with the rise of EVs. The first Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Renault Zoe had crappy little screens, and real buttons for everything, like most cars of their era.
OTOH today EV-hating Toyota keeps making screens bigger. The latest Lamborghini has multiple touchscreens too.
This change would have happened even if EVs didn't exist. iPad is more to blame for that trend than an electric drivetrain.
My gym got treadmills like this. Stupidest decision anyone could make because a large enough drop of sweat will activate the button, with the stop button being the absolute worst one to hit, because there's no "undo" - you hit stop, and you're stuck with a treadmill that's stopping and your activity is over.
A peugeot (e308?) I rented for a few weeks had that. Absolutely bonkers. When driving I normally feel my way ("max heating to get rid of fog is the third button to the left"), but with this I would also activate all other kinds of stuff all the time.
Recently changed offices at work. The new one has the same kind of buttons for the keypad. Just a flat surface with 9 numbers. I accidentally double press all the time, as it's hard to feel with no tactile feedback what you're doing and it's a bit delayed in the "beeps". So then you have to wait a few seconds and try again. Drives me mad.
A friends appartment building had had a keypad lock installed a few years ago. Nice physical buttons. I swear the lock opened before I pressed the last number of the code, that fast. Sadly they changed it to an even newer lock system a couple of months ago. Now it's still physical buttons but the unlocking takes a couple of seconds and is totaly quiet. So you try to open the door and nothing happens. And then you try again and then it works. The friend often gets calls from visitors asking what the code was again because they can't get in. UX seems to be hard even without mixing in touch-controls.
My dishwasher has buttons on the top like this, and during the heat dry cycle the steam will activate the buttons and I'll hear lots of random beeps from the kitchen. Ponce in a while it manages to cancel or restart itself, hilariously bad design.
While my dishwasher has the "buttons" at the top of the door, it puts the light on the bottom, so it shines on the floor. Little red dot. Cats like that dot.
My parents have one like this. My dad got it because it blends in with the cabinets. Purely an aesthetic choice. It absolutely sucks to use though because once the cycle is done it beeps extremely loudly until you open the door since it can't just indicate with a light that there are clean dishes ready inside.
I hate my dishwasher's touch buttons (Bosch 800 series) because of that. The amount of pressure you need to press a button is always ambiguous, so sometimes you press it too short and you have to press it again. Sometimes, the button registers, but you think you need to press it again, so you effectively cancel it, and must do it again. Worst UX ever.
Same with my apartment’s smart lock. The deadbolt gets extended accidentally while the door is open when someone brushes against the panel from the outside and you have to reach around the door to retract it.
It's pretty much the perfect linux laptop for me, but I will never willingly a laptop with a function row like that. A non-tactile ESC key is especially head-scratching.
> The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not.
> I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
My dishwasher has button to activate a control lock to prevent that. But the touch buttons suck so much and it requires a long press to activate that it always takes me two or three attempts and at least 10-15 seconds to push that button.
15 seconds for a button push, WTF were the designers thinking?
This is a big barrier for me replacing our gas stove with induction. I get why they use them (easy cleaning, flush profile) but I just find a knob 100x more pleasant to use.
I can't stand induction stove tops, partially for this reason and opted to put a gas stovetop in our kitchen with an electric oven. I cook a lot and trying to quickly adjust the heat when you have something on your hands makes them completely useless and infuriating. There's the whole sensory feedback side of gas too which I'm so used to but that's a separate topic.
These capacitive buttons are actually super cheap, a lot of microcontrollers have this function built-in so the buttons are effectively free, just an extra pad on the PCB.
My kettle decided to use capacitive resistance buttons (even though they're elevated so they could just be switches). Every time I splash water on them (which you know, can happen sometimes with kettles) I have to dry them off and power cycle the kettle to get them to work again.
I hate these and hope they are heading out also. Our hands and fingers are built to receive touch feedback, and these specific kind of buttons negate all of that.
> The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not.
Douglas Adams in 1979 knew the coming future:
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.